Discourse disputes in post-revolutionary Iran: A case study of the presidential election

Legitimacy of the government is one of the important and fundamental issues of governance. Legitimacy makes existing political institutions find moral justification because they want to show that they are focused on providing public good. This article, focusing on the transformation of post-revolutionary political discourses, seeks to answer the question, what role did the political discourses formed after the Islamic Revolution of Iran play in legitimizing the Islamic Republic? The hypothesis of the article is that the discourse conflicts of the presidential elections have fed on the main discourse of the revolution, and for this reason, despite the factional confrontations, they have ultimately been included in the discourse of the revolution and have strengthened it. Using the Weberian legitimacy triad for five existing discourses, the article has achieved an inferential analysis for each discourse, each of which has based and focused its signifiers on one of the Weberian legitimacy triads. The findings of the research have shown that each of the discourses has turned one of the signifiers of the revolution discourse into its central signifier, so in the end they have not acted in conflict with it, but in line with the strengthening of the revolution discourse. The approach of the article is discourse analysis and library information collection